We promised you an announcement and by golly it’s a doozy. After months of gruelling work we’re super pleased to reveal that TypeIt4Me Touch 2.0 for iOS is finally available to download from the iTunes App Store. A nifty mobile companion to our flagship Mac product, we’ve rebuilt it from scratch to achieve better performance and integrated some very useful new features. This sprightly new incarnation of our text expander app – formerly known as TapIt4Me – is a free upgrade for everyone who bought version 1.0. Better still, we’re offering it as a universal app optimised for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad at no extra cost.
For the uninitiated, TypeIt4Me Touch 2.0 is a text expansion app that enables you to speed up typing on your iDevice. It lets you use your own custom-defined shorthand abbreviations that will expand on the fly to longer words, phrases and snippets of boilerplate text as you continue typing. Swiftly compose a note with TypeIt4Me Touch and you can email, tweet or message it to someone directly from within the app. You can also save it for later or copy it to the clipboard to quickly paste into another app.
TypeIt4Me Touch is priced at a very reasonable $4.99 / £2.99 / 3.99€, so it’s not going to break the bank. Optimised for iOS 5.x and designed to play nicely with TypeIt4Me for Mac and OS X 10.7 Lion, it comes with some brand spanking new features, including:
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- iCloud support: use your TypeIt4Me abbreviations seamlessly across all your iDevices. iCloud support will be extended to the Mac version very soon, too.
- Auto-suggestion: if you switch this on in the app’s settings, TypeIt4Me Touch will display suggested words and snippets above the keyboard that match the letters you’re typing. Tap on these and you can really speed things along.
- A point-and-tap snippets menu: if you forget what abbreviation you assigned to a particular snippet while you’re composing a note, just press a button for a handy drop-down that lists all the snippets in your active set, scroll through it and tap on the one you want to insert into the note. Bam! There it is. (Due to screen size limitations, this is an iPad-only feature.)
Now that we’ve got the sales patter out of the way, please do head over to the App Store and check TypeIt4Me Touch out. We’re confident you’ll either love it, loathe it or have mixed feelings about the time-saving opportunities it opens up for you. For our part, we’re pretty stoked about it.
Well, that was the big news for today. It’s time for us to get back to work on the Mac version, but before we wrap this up, we’d just like to extend our grateful thanks and appreciation to the small army of dedicated volunteer beta testers who so dilligently found ways to break this app while it was in development. Their heroic efforts have helped us make TypeIt4Me Touch 2.0 a stronger, more robust animal. We hope it will make your life just that little bit easier. Enjoy.
7 Comments.
iCloud support! Nice. Thanks for the update, looking forward to being able to use the same shortcuts on my phone and ipad. How exactly do I import my Mac abbreviations file though? I’m not seeing an option to upload / sync them in iTunes.
Oh wait, ignore me. I just found the answer on your FAQ page and it worked a treat for now. Do you have an ETA for iCloud support in the Mac client, by any chance?
@Karl Thanks for trying out TypeIt4Me Touch, we’re glad to hear you’ve figured things out. iCloud support will be coming soon in the next Mac update, although we don’t have a firm date for release. In the meantime Mac TypeIt4Me users can email their abbreviation files to their iOS devices and open them up in TypeIt4Me Touch.
Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t this pretty much exaactly the same as what you can do by going into iOS keyboard settings > Shortcuts?
@Snufflelupugus TypeIt4Me Touch works in a similar way to iOS keyboard shortcuts, but it offers more sophisticated features. It’s geared towards making it easier to create, edit and share your snippets across your devices. There’s a more detailed answer to your question on our FAQ page – please take a look at “Why pay for TypeIt4Me Touch when I can use the iOS keyboard shortcuts feature for free?”
http://ettoresoftware.store/products/typeit4metouch/faq/
I was in an Apple store yesterday, looking at buying my first iPad. I asked about TypeIt4Me (which I’ve used on Mac since the mid-90s) and the assistant googled it for me on the iPad. I was thrilled to find out there was an iPad version and nearly bought the device there and then.
I was horrified to read further and discover that TI4M on iPad is NOT system-wide. You have to copy/paste your expanded text FROM the TI4M app TO any other app. NO!!!! I would never have originally started using using TI4M on that basis – its indispensable quality is that YOU NEVER HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT! It simply works, wherever you are on the Mac, in whatever app.
I simply cannot use TI4M on a single-app basis. If it doesn’t work system-wide, I’m not interested in it or even in getting an iPad. Without my 700+ abbreviations, I’m lost.
I will investigate whether TextExpander works system-wide, or any other app. If there isn’t one, then iPad isn’t for me I’m afraid.
Dear Chris,
We completely understand your dismay. If there were a way that we could make TypeIt4Me Touch work seamlessly systemwide on the iPad, we absolutely would. Sadly, the locked-down nature of iOS prevents us from doing so. For security reasons Apple insists that iOS apps must remain self contained, so unfortunately text expansion apps like ours cannot work the same way on iDevices as they do on the Mac.
We made TypeIt4Me Touch available for iOS so that our customers can use their Mac TypeIt4Me abbreviations if they find they need to compose long form notes on their iPads, iPhones and iPods. Of course, having to then copy and paste the composed content into other apps is far from ideal, but our feeling is that at least having this option is better than nothing at all. Notes composed in TypeIt4Me Touch can also be emailed and messaged directly from within the app.
If you do ultimately acquire an iPad, you may find that using TypeIt4Me Touch in conjunction with Apple’s built-in keyboard shortcuts facility can go some way toward replicating the Mac text expansion experience. It won’t be as convenient, but unless Apple changes its policies and allows third party apps to provide systemwide text expansion on iOS devices, it may have to do.
Whatever you decide, we thank you for the support you’ve given us. While it pains us that we’re prevented from meeting expectations on the iOS side of things, it’s always nice to hear from longtime TypeIt4Me customers who’ve found our Mac client useful. If there’s anything else we can help you with, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.